Now, now that the Sun
Hath veil'd his light,
And bid the World good night,
To the soft bed my body I dispose.
But where, where shall my soul repose…?
Even I had trouble at times making out the words. I did not test to see if Helen could separate the sung phonemes or, higher, if a sung "sun" said the same thing to her as a spoken one. Higher stilclass="underline" if she could hear the sung "soul," and if she knew it to be roughly the same sound as "soul" in speech, then what, if anything, did Purcell's somnambulist have to do with Whitman's spider?
If she got that impossibly far, Helen would still not have been able to assemble the outermost frame. It amused her to listen to humans singing about the disposition, the disposal of their bodies at day's end, and their anxiety over housing whatever was left over. The text of this evening prayer could not have caused Helen much lost sleep.
She loved, too, that same voice as it haunted a tune named for its own first line. The tune, by Alfonso Ferrabosco, lodged at the turn of the seventeenth century. I don't know if Helen had a concept of epochs and succession, or whether she thought, as I did at her intellectual age, that all eras persisted somewhere, deep in the hive. I don't even know what she heard in place of these notes:
So beauty on the water stood
When love had sever'd earth from flood.
So when he parted air from fire,
He did with concord all inspire.
And then a motion he them taught,
That elder than himself was thought.
Which thought was yet a child of earth,
For love is elder than his birth.
Perhaps she liked the tune's abject simplicity. It did little more than ascend the scale, make a pilgrim's delaying spin, and wander back down again. Maybe the charm lay in that minute sigh vanishing almost before the mind knew it had begun, or in that voice, too sweet to exist in any world but the mind's ear.
These eight short lines required a density of keys that had grown unparsably more complex since their Renaissance casting. Even knowing the cosmological allusions didn't crack the conundrum, but made it more inscrutable. Each time Helen demanded that I "sing beauty," the song grew less solvable. After a while, I could no longer determine pronominal antecedents or order the terms.
The little syllogism defeated me. The "he" that ordered chaos must have been love. What, then, was the motion, love himself or something older? Which thought was "which thought" — the thought he taught them, or the thought that the love love taught them was elder than love himself? If love were his own elder, how did that make either of those thoughts younger than the earth that love made?
Untroubled by logic, Helen glided back to tonic. She seemed the maker of the song she needed.
I didn't have the heart to tell her how unbearable this music sounded, on the stage of events unfolding beyond the Center's windows. Her smallest textual interpretation would be meaningless without that context. Yet outside lay a nightmare I still thought her myopic perceptron maps need never look upon, even if they could.
Instrumental music left her more restive. The blur of raw event rattled her in ways it never would rattle a thing with a body. She struggled to turn bowed strings and buzzing reeds into phonemes. The less she could, the harder she tried.
I took her on a tour of world music. I played her the kluay and gong wong yai of my youth. I tried her on sackbuts and singing drums. I had no way of gauging her response, whether delight or agitation. She stopped me only once. In a moment of backsliding, I'd put on a tape I'd made years ago for C. A sampler of her favorites that, in comfort or in spite, was one of the few keepsakes I rescued when I made my quick evacuation from Europe.
I'd forgotten what was on the tape. We reached that ineffable clarinet, assembling, atop the reconciled chamber orchestra, the peace that the world cannot give. Helen shouted, "I know that." This piece is familiar. Mine.
I did not see how, and then I did. The Mozart that Lentz fed a nameless neural net the night before I met him. Long before we'd conceived of the idea of Helen, some ancestor of hers had learned this piece.
I felt my skin turn to goose flesh — chicken skin, as I would have called it in Dutch, as little as a year ago. Lentz had sutured her to old circuits, experiments he never so much as described to me. Helen had inherited archetypes. She'd been born wanting song. She remembered, even things that she had never lived.
Three weeks of deliberately not thinking about her, and my suppressed image of A. erupted into full-blown obsession.
I imagined a whole day around her. I outfitted her hours and blueprinted her afternoons. I pictured when and how she took her meals. I let us talk over the international community's latest gossip. We laughed at every inanity, local and large. I comforted her invented distress and celebrated the triumphs I made her tell me. I put her to bed each evening to words and music. I woke her up in life's early morning and stared at her unsuspecting eyes as they blinked open in astonishment, full of grace, force, fascination, accepting, improvising, the equal to anything.
My decline accelerated, complete and irrevocable, like the best of runaway sleds. I fed on daily, exhilarating regression. I bicycled past A.'s house in the dark, something I'd last done at eleven for a girl whose name I'd forever forgotten by high school. I studied A.'s phone number in the departmental directory. I looked up her schedule in the English staff Rolodex. I learned that she taught composition and intro to fiction while finishing her own graduate course work. Feminist theory.
I memorized her office hours. She was in two mornings a week and three afternoons. At first, I avoided the building at those times. Later, I shot for them.
I told myself that my preoccupation with A. was harmless. Cultivated. A hobby. The safest hazard of my occupation. Then, one morning, it was none of those things.
I was browsing the campus bookstore, anxious, as usual, at all the volumes I would never get to before I died. I saw A. before I knew I saw her. She stood purveying Theory and Criticism, shelves that I hadn't looked at for a long time. She hovered over the lined-up spines in a reverie of self-judgment. I realized I was in trouble. More trouble than I could remember having been in.
I might have picked up on this long before I did. Any fix that the self needs to convince itself of has already failed.
I saw her no more than once in a dozen days, for less than a minute each time. We had yet to exchange a nod of the head. Hello lay outside the realm of possibility. Watching her at wide intervals was like listening to those endless Renaissance melismas where the very idea of words gets lost in a tangle of counterpoint a year longer than the ear.
A little sun, a cool breeze, this face, and I was done for. Dead. A carapace the length of my body split open. All I needed to do was step out.
A. floated free of her signifier. Her features traced a curve that encouraged my projective exercise. Or rather, my projection pinned that facilitating arc to her like a corsage. It seemed to me, then, that love must make a blank slate to write itself on. Only instant, arbitrary attachment to strangeness made real that lab where processes bested things, two falls out of three.
I talked to her so often in my head I felt in danger of hailing A. each time I saw her. No limit to how badly I might humiliate myself. At my age, such absurdity did not even qualify as licit humiliation. When C. and I had moved to B., this other girl was still kneesock-deep in dolls.
Premature mid-life crisis, I told myself. Just getting it out of the way early. On lucid days, I dropped the "early."